Back in March wethrew a little get together in Vegas called MIX’06. This wasn’t your typical Microsoft conference. This was about brining designers and developers together to discuss the next generation of applications. As a matter of fact, I saw more MacBook’s at this conference than any other conference I’ve attended before. Aside from the Orange Dragon episode, it was a fantastic time.

Although you won’t be able to experience the sites and sounds of Vegas, you can certainly relive the great content.

On Monday, Clemens Vasters presented a session on going from HTML to services. He touched on all the acronym buzzwords (AJAX, RSS, SOAP, REST, WS-*) and how to utilize them best to open your web application as a consumable service. The talk really got interesting when Clemens moved into the demo portion.

See, Clemens recently joined Microsoft. At some point in the near future, Clemens will be moving from his home in Germany to the land of coffee shops and grunge music. Although Clemens is looking forward to the move, he isn’t looking forward to not being able catch his beloved football (soccer) team in action. So, Clemens took the bull by the horns and solved a real world problem. How do you watch German television from half-way around the world? Well, if you’re Clemens, you use a combination of messaging technologies to build your own personal media streaming application.

He has a Windows Media Center server in place at his parent’s house in Germany that he’s using as a service to browse the programming guide and select which programs he’d like to record. Oncea program has been recorded, he’s able to stream the recordings down to his computer through Windows Media Player. Another cool aspect of the demo was that Clemens built a web page with some uses of AJAX and RSS that lives right in the Windows Media Player that gives him control to his programming guide within the player itself. Very cool demo.

If you’re interested in learning more about the application, head on over to http://www.newtellivision.tvto check it out.

Tag: MIX06

Well… after an hour and a half flight delay and a cabbie who decided to take me on a tour of the Nevada state highway system, I finally rolled into the Venetian at 2AM on Sunday..er..Monday morning. I would also like to thank the previous guest of our palatial suite who decided to set the alarm clock set for 4:30AM and to leave it on! Have you ever tried turning an alarm clock off that’s not yours, in the pitch black, with your eyes half open???

No worries…I’m finally here and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next 3 days has in store. It’s sure to be a grand time.

Tags: MIX06

I had planned to write up my notesfrom this morning’s kickoff keynote at MIX’06, but than I saw Doug Seven had already posted a compelling synapsis that I could only hope to duplicate. Therefore, other than wasting my time at a failed attempt to do one better, I’ll send you over to Doug’s post from today’s keynote.

Tags: MIX06